Beyond the roots of human inaction: Fostering collective effort toward ecosystem conservation
Inspiring action on climate change
Psychologists already contribute to individual-level behavior-change campaigns in the service of sustainability, but attention is turning toward understanding and facilitating the role of individuals in collective and collaborative actions that will modify the environmentally damaging systems in which humans are embedded. Especially crucial in moving toward long-term human and environmental well-being are transformational individuals who step outside of the norm, embrace ecological principles, and inspire collective action. Particularly in developed countries, fostering legions of sustainability leaders rests upon a fundamental renewal of humans’ connection to the natural world.
"Psychological research suggests that humans can move toward a sustainable society by creating conditions that motivate environmentally responsible collective action – conditions that help people surmount cognitive limits, create new situational drivers, foster need fulfillment, and support communities of social change. Individuals whose actions are informed by a deeper understanding of how the planet really works can galvanize collectives to change the larger systems that drive so much of human behavior. To radically alter the way humans think and live; educate the next generation; and design physical, governmental, and cultural systems, humans must experience and better understand their profound interdependence with the planet."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/may/19/study-inspiring-action-on-climate-change-is-more-complex-than-you-might-think#img-2
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6335/275?rss=1
Also:
"We need to embrace all of society. We need to solve social problems of poverty and wars with imagination, compassion, creativity and forgiveness. All problems can be solved by negotiation, friendship, giving in, letting go of ego and going into eco. Let us make a shift from from self-interest to mutual-interest of whole human society. If we can have a holistic view of soil, soul and society, if we can understand the interdependence of all living beings, and understand that all living creatures – from trees to worms to humans – depend on each other, then we can live in harmony with ourselves, with other people and with nature."
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/satish-kumar-soil-soul-society
What can I say? We need to drop ego in favour of eco, says Satish Kumar. Indeed. But what do we mean by 'eco?' Lots of old, old lessons to be re-learned here. Naturalism is not enough. We need to drop ego, and embrace a moral ecology that acknowledges our social and natural dependency (We are Dependent Rational Animals, to use the title of a fine book by Alasdair MacIntyre - well worth reading folks). But there is an interplay between a relative moral independence, a natural dependence, and a social and planetary interdependence. I go on about practical reasonableness, human goods (substantive and reflexive), communities of practice, habits, character formation, forms of the common life and virtues a lot, no doubt boring the teeth of most people - but this is all about creating a social identity in which there is a direction connection between individual good and social good, short-term good and long-term good - a social formation that gives appeals to the common good a social and practical relevance. Only been on about it since ever. Knowledge and know-how give us the ability to act, they do not make us want to act - bridging theoretical reason and practical reason (politics and ethics, with economics as a branch) through social formation has always been key - tapping into the motivational economy.
It's old stuff, to be found in Plato and Aristotle, in Kant's practical philosophy, in Aquinas.
Human beings possess an innate moral ability to apprehend moral truths.
Aquinas defines this capacity for apprehending ethical first principles by the term synderesis:
"Synderesis ... is in a certain way innate to our mind from the light of agent intellect, just as is the dispositional grasp of speculative principles, such as that every whole is greater than its part." (II Sent. 24.2.3c).
Simple. Aquinas identifies the first principle of practical reasoning as this: The good should be done and pursued, and the bad should be avoided. (ST Ia2ae 94.2c). The question is how this principle could take practical form.
A habitus brings human beings some way toward actuality, turning what was hitherto the potential to act in a certain way into the ability to perform that action well: “Sometimes the intellect stands midway between potentiality and actuality, and then the intellect is said to have a habitus" (ST la 79.6 ad 3); "a habitus and a power differ in this, that through a power we are able to do something, whereas through a habitus it is not that we are made able to do something, but that we are made ready (habilis) or unready to do well or badly that which we can do" (SCG IV.77.4/4114).
The underlying disposition "more truly has the nature of a virtue inasmuch as it gives a person not just the ability or the knowledge to act rightly, but also the will to do so" (QDVC 7c). ‘Prudence does this, not because it is a virtue of the will, but because it holds intellect steadfast in its orientation, allowing the will to act in accord with right reason so as best to pursue the ends that the virtuous person desires by a kind of second nature.’ (Pasnau and Shields 2004: 240).
The point is that prudence is a disposition quite unlike knowledge. This is because knowledge is not a virtue in the truest sense defined by Aquinas, to the extent that it lacks an appetitive component. Knowledge would be a genuine virtue if it made one positively desire to grasp the true. But knowledge is not appetitive in this sense: "[H]aving knowledge does not make one want to consider the truth; it just makes one able to do so" (QDVC 7c). ‘We all know, in some sense of 'know', the difference between right and wrong. But we do not all desire to embrace this knowledge and let it guide our lives. The disposition of prudence guarantees that our intellect will attend to the relevant information we possess. Guided by the virtue of justice, the prudent person will fasten on those aspects of the situation that bear on treating others fairly and equally. Guided by the virtue of temperance, the prudent person will dwell on resisting temptation. In these cases, Aquinas describes the intellect as "following the will." The underlying disposition "more truly has the nature of a virtue inasmuch as it gives a person not just the ability or the knowledge to act rightly, but also the will to do so" (QDVC 7c). Prudence does this, not because it is a virtue of the will, but because it holds intellect steadfast in its orientation, allowing the will to act in accord with right reason so as best to pursue the ends that the virtuous person desires by a kind of second nature.’
So it might look odd that I potter around so much in the old natural law tradition, a tradition whose precepts and principles sound boring and look antiquated, and may be susceptible to all kinds of elitism and hierarchies with respect to virtue ethics. But it's a rich resource, and we need to pay more attention to the human environment as part of attending to and caring for the natural environment. Morality matters. Character construction matters. Social formation matters. What has stopped us? Clearly, the alienating and separating dualisms of prevailing social relations, confining us within a social identity that separates immediate individual interest and long-term common interest, that makes rational and moral appeals to the common good impotent, socially irrelevant and, in terms of the sacrifice of self-interest required of the self-maximising individual (the dominant identity and model of rationality), irrational. The result is that we are confined within socially structured patterns of behaviour that make sense in terms of an immediate self-interest, but no sense at all in terms of collective ruination - individual freedom and rationality thus translate into a collective unfreedom and irrationality. We need to attend to the social, moral and institutional infrastructure (and many movements and initiatives and transition and design strategies are doing that).
I'll finish by quoting some hard-hitting words from former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, (commenting on Yuval Noah Harari's bestselling book 'Sapiens' and Douglas Murray's 'The Strange Death of Europe'), emphasising the need to take care of the human environment – the moral infrastructure – as well as the natural environment:
“The idea that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. If we lose that belief none of the other institutions of the contemporary world is going to save us. Not science, not technology, not market economics and not the liberal democratic state. For a pretty simple reason. Because science can tell us how but not why; technology can give us power, but cannot tell us how to use that power. The market economy gives us choices but doesn’t tell us which choices lead on to human flourishing and which to self-destruction. The liberal democratic state gives us freedom, but cannot itself provide the intellectual, moral or spiritual basis of that freedom. So the end result is, to put it mildly, we are in trouble. What Yuval Noah Harari and Douglas Murray are telling us is that you don’t have to be religious to recognize all the danger signals and all the early warning signs. And whether Europe dies and hands over to the barbarians or, for Yuvel Harari, humanity dies and hands over to the robots, one way or another we are at serious risk. And, therefore, my suggestion is really quite simple: all of us, religious and non-religious alike, who believe in liberal humanism, who believe in human dignity, who believe in the free society, had better come together soon to work to protect the human environment with the same passion as we have come together in the past to protect the natural environment. Because if we fail to do so, we will, by forgetting our past, lose, destroy, our human future. And if that happens, heaven help us and our grandchildren.”
Call it the motivational economy, call it the moral infrastructure, the habitus in which virtues are acquired and exercised, paideia, Bildung, whatever - pay attention to it, nurture it, cultivate it, it is essential to human flourishing. It's about forming characters rather than informing heads - equipment and activation at the level of morals and motivations. Without it, there's nothing but some extraneous engineering approach that seeks to manipulate and manage. It won't work - it's rootless and fruitless, grounded in nothing and goes nowhere. Such ideas are rootless in that they lack foundations in anything stable or substantial; they are fruitless in that they cannot yield a morality consistent with our deepest intuitions and sensibilities. And if that sounds too conservative for some tastes, it comes straight from Rousseau, a man who seems to be neither here nor there, just a simple truth seeker who, in the course of a lifetime, upset everyone - but was praised as a 'genius' by Hume and described as the 'Newton of the moral world' by Kant - the two finest philosophers of the age, whose work stands at the top of the tree when it comes to the moderns.
Material sufficiency and virtuous action within right relationships. It's in Aquinas. It's why I keep posting on Alasdair MacIntyre. He shows a lot of what we need. We can build communities of practice and communities of character, giving us the form/s of the common life geared to the human goods - their formation is crucial to the planetary good - the interdependence of human and planetary flourishing. Judging by the lack of reaction I get on social media, it isn't a popular message. But the failure to take morality seriously in terms of relations and practices and precepts and principles that inspire and obligate will prove fatal in the end.
I get the impression that many think such words conservative, reactionary even. That's a mistake, and certainly betrays a superficial reading of MacIntyre.
A lifelong marxist, Terry Eagleton, who wrote the book "Why Marx was Right", gives us this critique of cultural theory:
"Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions. Let us see if we can begin to remedy these deficiencies by addressing these issues in a different light." (Eagleton, After Theory 2003 ch 4).
"There is, however, a much deeper irony. At just the point that we have begun to think small, history has begun to act big. 'Act locally, think globally' has become a familiar leftist slogan; but we live in a world where the political right acts globally and the postmodern left thinks locally. As the grand narrative of capitalist globalization, and the destructive reaction which it brings in its wake, unfurls across the planet, it catches these intellectuals at a time when many of them have almost ceased to think in political terms at all. Confronted with an implacable political enemy, and a fundamentalist one at that, the West will no doubt be forced more and more to reflect on the foundations of its own civilization.
It must do so, however, at the very time when the philosophers are arriving hot-foot with the news that there are no such foundations in the first place. The bad news is that the Emperor is naked. The West, then, may need to come up with some persuasive-sounding legitimations of its form of life, at exactly the point when laid-back cultural thinkers are assuring it that such legitimations are neither possible nor necessary. It may be forced to reflect on the truth and reality of its existence, at a time when postmodern thought has grave doubts about both truth and reality. It will need, in short, to sound deep in a progressively more shallow age.
The inescapable conclusion is that cultural theory must start thinking ambitiously once again - not so that it can hand the West its legitimation, but so that it can seek to make sense of the grand narratives in which it is now embroiled." (Eagleton 2003 ch 3).
Eagleton proceeds to write about the intertwining of ethics and politics and the need for the normative in an emancipatory politics, defending truth, virtue and objectivity, happiness, what it is to be human, flourishing, succeeding at what we are equipped to excel at, and he argues that what postmodern thinkers criticize as 'essentialism' is a caricature of the doctrine of essences which is defended by precisely no-one. Praise be!
"Aristotle thought that there was a particular way of living which allowed us, so to speak, to be at our best for the kind of creatures we are. This was the life conducted according to the virtues. The Judaeo-Christian tradition considers that it is the life of charity or love. What this means, roughly speaking, is that we become the occasion for each other's self-realization. It is only through being the means of your self-fulfilment that I can attain my own, and vice versa. There is little about such reciprocity in Aristotle himself. The political form of this ethic is known as socialism, for which, as Marx comments, the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. It is, as it were, politicized love, or reciprocity all round.
Socialism is an answer to the question of what happens when, unlike Aristotle, we universalize the idea of self-realization, crossing it with the Judaeo-Christian or democratic-Enlightenment creed that everyone must be in on the action. If this is so, and if human beings naturally live in political society, we can either try to arrange political life so that they all realize their unique capacities without getting in each other's way, a doctrine known as liberalism; or we can try to organize political institutions so that their self-realization is as far as possible reciprocal, a theory known as socialism. One reason for judging socialism to be superior to liberalism is the belief that human beings are political animals not only in the sense that they have to take account of each other's need for fulfilment, but that in fact they achieve their deepest fulfilment only in terms of each other." (Eagleton 2003 ch 5).
So what we have here is a society whose institutions and relations are organised around a mutual self-giving, not merely receiving from others, nor even reciprocity, but a happiness and fulfilment that comes from giving to others, service to others, communion with something greater than we are. That's what coming out of the ego means, embracing an "eco" that is something greater than we are, of which we are part, which nourishes the soul and inspires us to act, to commit to life, to each other. Self-giving as a society of love and friendship, mutual aid, attending and care. That's not just my kind of society, it's a society for all of us.